


a heavy leaf to turn

by lavendrsblue



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Era, Friends to Lovers, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, M/M, Post-Canon, Slow Build, University, platonic daiyui
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 15:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4611168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavendrsblue/pseuds/lavendrsblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a part of Daichi that burns steady and silver, a part that wouldn’t be there without Suga and everything he’s given to him in the years they’ve known each other.</p><p>Daichi never thought he would see them grow apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a heavy leaf to turn

**Author's Note:**

> to the twitter HQ fam - thanks for being wonderful and hilarious and listening to me yell about this big gay mess for the past six weeks. you all are the BEST.
> 
> title from "portugal" by walk the moon, which i listened to approximately five million times while writing this.

Sometime during their first year of high school, Daichi finds himself peering up at Suga upside-down, his back against the floor and his legs kicked up on Suga’s bed. He can feel the blood rushing to his head, but it hasn’t quite given him a headache yet. The reasoning behind his position: maybe if he looks at the paper from a different direction, this volleyball play will finally start making sense.

“Is it working?” asks Suga from where he’s seated at his desk like a normal person.

“I don’t think so.” The little circles and arrows are unforgiving. “What do you think the wiggly arrow’s supposed to mean?”

Suga squints. “Is that an arrow? I thought he just dropped the pen and it smudged.”

“Maybe…”

A knock on the door interrupts their concentration. “Koushi?” It takes Daichi a moment to realize that means Suga.

“What?”

The door slides open and Suga’s sister appears, chewing gum. “Oh, hi, Sawamura.”

“Hi.” Sheepish, Daichi swings his legs down to the floor so he can sit upright. She politely refrains from laughing at the way his face gets kind of smushed against the floor in the process.

“Do you need anything at the supermarket?” she asks, turning back to Suga. “I’m about to leave.”

“No, I can go tomorrow.”

“But that’s a school night.”

“Yeah, I finished my homework already.”

“Are you serious?” She heaves a sigh, leaning against the doorframe. “I remember the beginning of high school,” she muses. “So little homework, so much time.”

“Yes, because now you’re always _drowning_ in assignments,” says Suga, glancing sideways at Daichi to share a grin. His sister was home from university for a semester break, and tended to complain of boredom in the absence of a challenge; Daichi guesses that she and Suga are similar in that way.

“Hey.” She points at him, accusing, but without any real heat. “You two had better watch out—high school will pass right by you, if you’re not careful.”

“Yeah, we’ve heard.” Suga tips his desk chair back onto two legs, balancing. “Do you have any more wisdom for us before you go to the store?”

“Don’t make fun of me because I’m old now, Koushi.”

“I’m not,” says Suga, eyes wide and innocent. Daichi muffles a laugh with the back of his hand. “It’s because you’ve turned into a nerd at university—”

“Bye, Sawamura,” she interrupts, ignoring him for Daichi. “It was nice to see _you_ for a few minutes, at least.”

“You too,” he says. He likes Suga’s sister; she always has funny stories from university and a snack in her bag. She grins at him before sliding the door shut.

Suga rolls his eyes the moment she’s gone, and Daichi laughs.

“That won’t happen to us,” says Suga confidently. “We won’t lose track of time like that.” One of his feet braces against his desk, balancing his chair; the other swings back and forth. Daichi shakes his head emphatically.

“Definitely not,” he agrees. Suga grins at him. “Do you want to go outside and practice? We can try and figure out that play.”

“Sure.” Suga stands as Daichi scrambles to his feet, grabbing the volleyball from the corner of the room. “Maybe if we get hit in the head enough times it’ll start making sense.”

Suga tosses, Daichi spikes, and they take turns running after errant serves till the sun begins to set and the shadows grow long. Daichi could get used to this, he thinks as they head inside for dinner: the heft of a volleyball in his hands and Suga at his side, shivering against the nighttime breeze. If the first year of high school is already this good, the next two and a half can only be even better.

***

When Daichi makes captain, his first action is to turn to Suga beside him and say, “You’ll be my vice, won’t you?”

“Your ‘vice’?” Suga raises an eyebrow. “That’s a strange way to word it. I didn’t think I was that bad an influence.”

“Suga,” says Daichi, exasperated.

“Of course I will.” Suga shoves his shoulder hard. Daichi nearly trips into the nearest potted plant, but he’s grinning all the same. “You knew that already.”

He shrugs. “I wanted to ask anyway.”

“What, are you doubting me?”

“I would never,” says Daichi, mock-seriously. They stand aside as the girls’ basketball team clatters past on the stairs to the club rooms, shouting victorious after their practice game. As the noise dies down, Daichi says quietly, “You know I wouldn’t ask anyone else.”

On the edge of his periphery, Suga’s mouth twists into half a smile. “Well, there’s something I don’t hear every day.” _There is no one else to ask_ , he doesn’t say. In a corner of Daichi’s mind he sees Asahi walking away from them in the hallway all over again, shoulders hunched almost to his ears.

“Even if we had the biggest team in the prefecture,” begins Daichi, and Suga turns to look at him curiously. “I’d still choose you.” 

Suga stares at him. Seconds tick by, and doubt begins to curl in the pit of Daichi’s stomach. “Ah… sorry, was that weird? I just meant, since we’re, uh, really close, and I know we’d work well together, for the team—”

“For the team,” repeats Suga.

“Yeah, because—that’s what’s most important, and… hey,” he protests, because Suga’s resting his fingers on his lips, a halfhearted attempt to cover a smile.

“What? Keep going, I want to know what you were going to say.”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“Am not.” Suga holds up his free hand in a _who, me?_ gesture, grinning. “See? Not at all.”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, since we don’t have a coach, should we start calling you _sensei_?”

“Shut up!”

“Whatever you say, Sawamura-sensei.”

Daichi groans, drags his hands down his face. “Why am I friends with you?”

“It’s too late to back out now,” says Suga cheerfully. “I’m your vice captain, we have to stick together.”

“I’ve made a mistake,” says Daichi, to the world at large. “A terrible mistake.”

“That’s the spirit.” Suga claps him on the back. “To celebrate your mistake, I’ll even buy you a pork bun.”

“Wait, really?”

“Only if you win, though.”

“Win what?” is what Daichi would have said, if Suga hadn’t taken off at a sprint down the road, cackling. The straps of Daichi’s backpack cut into his shoulders as he follows. It’ll hurt like hell on top of his volleyball bruises tomorrow, but it’s not as if he hasn’t dealt with it before; it’s not as if he doesn’t know what to do with a muscle spasming in his neck or Suga shouting in triumph as he jumps to smack the Sakanoshita sign, sending it swinging—the traditional endpoint of all their races.

Suga buys him a pork bun anyway, and as they head home, he’s the first to break their comfortable silence. “Daichi.”

He pauses with the bun halfway to his mouth. “Yeah?”

“You’ll be a good captain.” Daichi turns to find Suga looking straight at him, earlier teasing gone from his expression. Something flutters in Daichi’s stomach—anticipation, or nerves, or maybe just the pork bun disagreeing with him.

“I won’t let you down,” he promises. When Suga smiles, it’s a warm blanket settling over his shoulders, smoothing out the tension in his muscles, warming him to the core.

“I know you won’t.”

***

It hurts to blink.

Is he bleeding? It kind of feels like he’s bleeding—warm, and wrong. His whole head throbs, especially the side of his face where he’d slammed into Tanaka’s shoulder. Distantly he hears shouting from the sidelines, but it takes a moment to place why it seems so odd: the stands immediately around them have fallen silent, holding collective breaths. The most immediate sounds are the squeaks of volleyball shoes against the floor, his teammates running to his side.

There’s something metallic and bitter in his mouth. A moment later he realizes it’s blood. He makes a face at the taste, and Ukai, having reached his side, mistakes it for pain. (Well, it _is_ pain, also. Everything’s a little fuzzy at the moment.)

Daichi is nothing if not practical; he knows he should go straight to the nurse, it’s what he’d tell any injured player. But when it comes to himself, it feels different, though it would be arrogance to claim he’s somehow above his own advice.

He turns, and between Ukai and Takeda’s shoulders he sees Suga, trapped on the sidelines, staring at him. The expression on Suga’s face is as clear as if he’d spoken right in Daichi’s ear: _Go. Take care of yourself._

When he shuffles off the court, delivered into Kiyoko’s capable hands, the voice in his mind berating him for letting his team down is only his own.

In the end, though, he doesn’t return to the court straightaway; he hovers in the shadow of the stands, unwilling to disrupt the team’s new rhythm with Ennoshita. Watching them move as a cohesive unit without him stings a little, if he’s completely honest with himself, but mostly it makes him proud. He feels all warm and fuzzy, and it’s (probably) not just the painkillers.

After the match, it’s Tanaka who spots him first as the team comes tumbling into the hallway from the gymnasium. Noya leaps about two feet into the air in excitement and narrowly misses punching Asahi in the face. “Daichi-san!”

Daichi halts, hands jammed into pockets, hesitant suddenly. He’s let his team down at a critical moment, and he isn’t going to forget it anytime soon.

“I,” he begins. He forces a smile from the side of his mouth that wasn’t bleeding. “Sorry.” _I understand if you’re upset, I would be too, I swear I won’t make a mistake like that again, you were all amazing_ : he’s been rehearsing lines in his head from the moment he stepped off the court. But all of it slams to a stop in the next moment, because right behind Tanaka is Suga, and he lights up like he’s just received the best birthday gift of his life.

“DAICHI!”

In the two and a half years Daichi has known him, he’s never seen Suga jump that high. He practically clears Noya’s shoulders. As Suga shoves Tanaka out of the way, barreling toward him, Daichi can feel his posture straightening automatically, his heart rate picking up. Suga has always done this—made him stand taller, given him energy whenever he starts to burn low. Even in their earliest practices during their first year, when they’d been in the gym for hours and night had long since fallen and every muscle in Daichi’s body screamed at him to stop moving, all it had taken was a few words from Suga to get him up and running again. So this isn’t a new sensation; it’s the same now as it always has been.

In the split second before Suga reaches him, Daichi thinks he might be going in for a hug—and then Suga’s fist slams into his stomach, knocking his rehearsed words right out of his lungs.

“Suga, don’t do that!” scolds Asahi, but Suga is laughing, delighted, and Daichi can’t help but smile back.

The rest of the team catches up then, thankfully without any more punches. (Suga is the only one who would punch an invalid, Tsukishima points out.) Daichi finds himself swept up in his team, buoyed along by their chatter and post-win buzz.

“You’re going to have one hell of a bruise,” says Suga, as Hinata and Noya sprint ahead, racing to be the first outside. His finger ghosts over Daichi’s face, close enough to brush his eyelashes. “All over here.”

“I don’t mind. Could be worse.”

“Everyone will be so worried,” frets Asahi. “You look like someone beat you up.”

Suga grabs his arm, excited. “Say you got into a bar fight!”

“Why would I do that?”

“It makes you sound cooler. If you tell people it’s from volleyball, that’s not cool enough. No one will be impressed. Well, unless they’re also volleyball players, like—ooh.” His expression turns mischievous. “Micchan will be so disappointed, your nice face is all messed up now.”

 _Nice face?_ Suga thinks he has a nice face? Daichi knows he isn’t ugly—but why is that so startling? Maybe he does have a bit of a concussion, because it takes a moment for him to fully process the rest of Suga’s words. “Wait... Michimiya? What about her?”

“Maybe she’ll like him even more, though,” says Asahi thoughtfully. “Since she plays, too.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Suga eyes the rapidly purpling bruise, calculating.

“Like me?” repeats Daichi. “Of course she likes me. I like her, too. We’ve been friends since middle school.” Suga sighs; Asahi looks concerned.

“Daichi,” he says, very seriously. “Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

Suga shushes him, reaching over Daichi to grab his arm. “Asahi, no—be patient. We have to break this to him slowly, you can’t just throw truths at him like that.”

Asahi nods. “How do we tell him, though?”

“Gently.” Suga considers him like a particularly tricky math problem. “Maybe the painkillers are affecting his brain.”

“Ooh, maybe.”

“Guys, I’m _right here_.”

But even as they walk out of the gym to the parking lot, shoulders bumping on both sides, Suga teasing him relentlessly while Asahi laughs, he can’t focus on their words. He keeps hearing Suga’s voice from earlier, saying he has a nice face. Suga has a nice face too, Daichi supposes. His eyes are lighter than Daichi’s own, so they sort of—catch the light, sometimes, when they’re walking home from school together at sunset. And there’s the mole near his eye, which is… weirdly compelling. Come to think of it, Daichi has always been kind of fascinated by it. Sometimes he wants to reach out and touch it (though he never actually does). It feels like an oddly essential part of who Suga is. In Daichi’s mind, he always notices it, right after the way Suga’s eyes crinkle when he smiles.

Ukai shouts at them from several meters away, interrupting his thoughts—most of the team is already on the bus, stuffing their bags anywhere they’ll fit. They’ve left the two seats closest to the front open: the captain and vice captain’s unofficially designated spots. Daichi slides in after Suga, sitting carefully so as not to jar his head again.

Quiet settles gradually as their teammates fall asleep one by one. Snores rise somewhere from the back over the rumble of the engine. Suga’s knee keeps bumping his own with every dip in the road, their feet sandwiched between their duffel bags on the floor.

“Daichi,” says Suga. His voice is barely above a whisper. Daichi starts a little—he’d been halfway to falling asleep, himself.

“What?”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

Aw. “Were you _worried_ about me, Suga?” he teases.

In response he gets only a sigh. Daichi raises his head from the window and turns to look at his best friend—but Suga is already asleep.

***

They don’t tell each other which university offers they receive till after they’ve both accepted; trying to go to the same place feels like trying to hurry fate, or something. Still, Daichi can’t help the twinge of disappointment he feels when Suga tells him he’s staying close to home in Sendai, after Daichi’s announced he’s going to Tokyo. It’s not that Daichi isn’t happy for him—the program is one of the best medical schools in the prefecture—but now Suga will be an hours-long train ride away, instead of a short bike or a long walk.

So they resolve to Skype regularly. People do it all the time, how hard can it really be?

But this turns out to be easier said than done. Freshman year of university passes in bursts: there are weeks that last a hundred years, and there are months that pass in the blink of an eye. Daichi studies and plays intramural volleyball and keeps Kuroo and Bokuto from getting arrested (twice) and studies some more, and Suga is a constant near-presence, only a phone or Skype call away. His weekend nights are less often spent going out with his new friends, more often spent watching movies with Suga at one in the morning. He runs his laptop battery down to nothing as they quote along with the actors, cracking long-running jokes.

It’s weird, being in such a big city after a lifetime of countryside—there’s an entire building dedicated to the business school, and it feels enormous—and Daichi finds himself rambling about it one day in the middle of the afternoon, his phone propped between his cheek and his pillow.

“There are just so many people, _all the time,_ ” he says, gesturing as if Suga can somehow see him through his phone. “And they all have places to be.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“It is, sometimes,” he admits. “I’m still not totally used to it.” In the background he can hear Suga moving around, making dinner—something hot, Daichi guesses, partially because of the late autumn chill, partially because he can hear Suga cursing at his tiny, school-allowed hot plate. “Are you alright over there?”

“Hmm? Oh—yeah. Nearly burned myself, but I’m fine.”

Daichi shifts, settling into a more comfortable position sprawled across his bed. “So, how’s pre-med treating you?”

“Same as it was three weeks ago,” laughs Suga. Daichi feels his face heat up. They’ll see each other when they return home for the New Year, but it’s still more than a month till then, too long to go without hearing each other’s voices. “I wish they’d let me take more sciences, actually.”

“Why, because you enjoy suffering?”

Suga laughs again. “No, no. It’s just… I wish I could start learning things that’ll actually help me in the future. I know I have to get through all these classes first—” Daichi makes a face at the ceiling, recalling Suga’s piles of homework— “and I understand why. I just feel a bit useless, that’s all.”

“You’re not useless,” says Daichi, instantly. He senses Suga’s sigh more than he hears it, and sits up straight. “No, listen. It’ll all pay off someday, really soon. And when it does, you’re going to be so great, Suga, I mean it. You’re...” He breaks off, staring at the handful of photos taped to his wall. Asahi and Yui and Kiyoko and Suga grin at him on their last day of high school; next to them, the entire volleyball team dog-piles to cram into a shot for the first day of training camp. “Maybe no one else sees it yet, but they will soon. Everyone will, because you’re amazing.”

There’s a beat of silence a moment too long before Suga answers. “So earnest,” he says. “I miss having that. No one here believes in me like you do.” His tone is light, but Daichi knows the expression that must be on Suga’s face, trying to play casual as he pokes at his bowl of ramen.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he says, matching Suga’s tone.

“What would I do without you?” There’s a clatter on Suga’s end of the line. “Ouch!”

“Suga?”

“Burned myself for real this time.” Suga’s voice is slightly garbled, like he’s sucked the tip of one finger into his mouth and is talking around it. “I guess that means I should focus on eating.”

“Apparently,” laughs Daichi. “You should be careful with your hands, though. Those are your life.”

“I’m not a setter anymore, Daichi.”

“But you could be,” he persists.

“I suppose you’re right, though.” Suga’s voice has gone thoughtful. “I can’t be a doctor if I’ve burned my hands off making ramen too many times.”

“Well, when you put it like _that_.”

“I was just agreeing with you!”

Daichi grins at his cluttered desk. He’d never finished putting away the things he’d bought and received over summer break, so it’s scattered with reminders of home. “Go have dinner already.”

“I will, I will.” Daichi wonders if it’s possible to hear someone roll their eyes. “Bye, Daichi.”

“Bye, Suga,” he says, and he’s laughing as he hangs up.

***

His phone screen is marked up with sweaty fingerprints, a fact Daichi only notices after he checks the time for the ninth time in ten minutes. He wonders, with a disproportionate amount of urgency, if the rest of him is sweating as well, even though the end of February is cold as ever. Oh no, does he _smell_? What if he smells _terrible_ and doesn’t realize; what if Suga shows up only to realize that in the past five months his best friend has transformed into some kind of horrific monster that constantly smells like—sweat, and garbage, or something? Has he always smelled this bad? Why hasn’t anyone _told him_?

“Stop that,” he mutters. He’s being ridiculous, and Sawamura Daichi is not a ridiculous person, about ninety-nine percent of the time. Well—ninety percent, maybe. The other ten percent consists of times like this, as he panics silently on a busy street fifteen minutes’ walk from Karasuno.

He’s reuniting with his best friend after several months apart, Daichi reminds himself, not meeting the emperor, or going on a date, or anything like that. (He’d tackled the first-date thing midway through the school year; Suga had duly interrogated him afterward.) Still, he’s nervous. Which is weird! He freely admits that to himself.

It shouldn’t be weird. It’s just been so long since they’d seen each other in person. He and Suga hadn’t spent more than a few weeks apart throughout high school; even on breaks, there was still volleyball practice, and their houses were an easy bike ride away. So being separated from Suga had been… weird, and kind of sad, and some other adjectives Daichi can’t quite figure out.

His phone buzzes with a text from Suga. _Sorry, my mom wanted me to run an errand. Be there in 10._

Daichi’s about to reply when a second pops up: a picture of a giant plush shrimp toy, hanging in a vaguely familiar shop window. _Saw this yesterday. Refused to buy it._

He stifles a laugh with the back of his hand. As soon as Daichi gets his next paycheck, he decides, the plush will join _THE WORST FRIENDS IN THE WORLD_ , a collection of shrimp merchandise that Suga refers to as a cross between a modern art piece and a social experiment. It’s been a few months since any additions were made; hopefully it’s large enough to be especially obnoxious for Suga to drag back to Sendai.

“Daichi!”

At the sound of his name, Daichi nearly jumps out of his skin—but it’s not Suga, it’s Michimiya, grinning at him around a travel mug.

“Yui,” he says, after a moment of recovery. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“It’s like we never left school,” she laughs. Already her mood is contagious; he can feel his nervousness beginning to dissipate in the presence of his old friend. “Here, do you want some? I added ginger.” She holds out her mug, likely filled with her favorite green tea, but he shakes his head.

“Thanks, but I’m good. I’m about to go to lunch, actually.”

“Ooh!” She moves to clasp her hands together in excitement, but her tea gets in the way. “With who? Do you have a _date_ , Sawamura?”

He laughs. “Whenever I’m meeting someone, you always ask that.”

“Yes, because if I didn’t say it, you’d never even think about dating,” she says, punching him in the arm. “You need to relax sometimes!”

“I _am_ relaxing,” says Daichi, only a tiny bit miffed. “I’m seeing Suga.”

“Oh!” Yui’s eyes go huge and round. “Really? That’s great!”

Daichi blinks. “Is it?”

“Yes!” She grabs his arm and shakes it, nearly dropping her tea in the process. “I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks?” He glances around, as if some passing stranger will understand Yui’s excitement better than he does. “I mean, I’m excited, too. I haven’t seen him since winter break.”

She makes a sympathetic noise. “That must have been tough.”

“Yeah, actually,” he admits. Anxiety creeps back into his gut. “He’s my best friend. I’m sure it must have been hard for you to be away from your old friends, too.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s…” Yui trails off, an odd expression dawning on her face. “You mean you’re seeing him _right now_.”

“Yes?” says Daichi, after a pause. “When else would I be seeing Suga?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says vaguely. Daichi frowns.

“Yui—”

“It’s so cold today!” she interrupts. “I think I want a snack. Do you want anything?”

“Uh, no thanks. But—”

“I’ll be right back!” And she vanishes into the nearest shop, the bells over the door jingling in her wake. Daichi stares after her. A memory nags the back of his mind: their third year of high school, Yui darting out the door of the gymnasium with a super-fast “Got to go!”, and later, Asahi opening the door to the club room only to be greeted by a faceful of scarecrow, leftover from the cultural festival. (“If you jumped that high during games, you’d give Hinata a run for his money,” said Suga, afterward.)

It’s weird—Daichi takes a moment to bemoan his lack of better vocabulary—and a little unnerving. He’d like to think he knows Yui pretty well after six-plus years of friendship, but he has no idea what she’s doing.

Hopefully it won’t involve any more scarecrows.

He turns back to the street, scanning the storefronts across from him. A thin sheen of cold sweat is beginning to form between his shoulders under all his layers. He hopes, less urgently this time, that he isn’t going to be a disgusting mess by the time Suga arrives.

But all his worries are laid to rest in the next moment as he turns and spots Suga rounding a corner, half-turned away. He’s watching a woman passing on a bicycle, tailed by her tiny daughter. Suga smiles at the girl as she wobbles past him on training wheels, and affection swells in Daichi’s chest till he can barely breathe, till he feels like he might burst.

Suga looks up as if he can feel Daichi’s gaze on him. When he smiles it’s blinding, brighter than the midday spring sunlight around him. “Daichi!”

It’s a good thing Suga’s on the same side of the street as Daichi is, because if he were across the way, Daichi probably would’ve walked right out into oncoming traffic without a moment’s hesitation, so intent is he suddenly on reaching Suga _right this second._

Daichi slows on instinct as he draws closer, bracing himself, but for once Suga doesn’t go in for a punch. Instead he opts for a rib-cracking hug. The two of them are the perfect height for hugs, as Suga pointed out long ago; the couple of centimeters Daichi has on him mean that they can fit together without needing to navigate shoulders or chins. They simply fall together and lock into place, as they do now.

Daichi hangs onto him tightly, momentarily overwhelmed by the smell of Suga all around him: the same shampoo he used in high school, laundry detergent, something else he can’t quantify.

“Hi,” he says, a bit breathless. ( _Rib-cracking_ is only a small exaggeration.)

“Hi,” says Suga, burying his face in Daichi’s shoulder. Daichi laughs, staggering a bit off-balance.

“I forgot you’re an octopus like this.”

“Daichi! How could you?” Suga releases him and steps back. Half a second later comes the punch to the stomach Daichi had initially been expecting; he isn’t expecting it now, though, and he wheezes a little as Yui reappears from the shop, a paper bag in hand.

“Suga!” she cries.

“Micchan!”

The bag falls to the ground as she leaps at Suga for a hug, and he nearly lifts her off her feet. “I didn’t expect to see you, too,” he says as he sets her back down, wobbling a little. “Now I get to see two of my favorite people.”

“Aww, I missed you too,” says Yui. She and Suga beam at each other. It’s funny, Daichi thinks, how sometimes Yui’s smile reminds him of Suga’s when she’s really excited—it’s the way her whole face lights up, like her entire being is smiling at him.

“Are you joining us for lunch?” asks Suga. _No_ , thinks Daichi, and immediately feels guilty. But before he can examine that train of thought too closely, Yui answers, with a lot of gesturing to accompany it.

“No, no, I don’t want to intrude!” she says, flapping her hands at them as Suga retrieves her bag from the ground. “You two go have fun! Together!”

“Is that an order?” laughs Suga. Yui punches him in the shoulder, pink-cheeked.

“Shut up! You know what I mean.”

“You’re welcome to come, if you have the time,” says Daichi, but she shakes her head.

“I’ve got to get home, I’m helping my mom cook dinner tonight.”

Daichi glances at Suga, puzzled, but Suga’s expression is politely neutral. “But it’s only lunchtime—”

“Ooh, look at the time,” says Yui, eyes going wide as she checks her phone. “Got to go! I’ll see both of you soon!” And with a last quick hug from Suga and a promise to text, she’s off down the street and around a corner, gone before Daichi can blink twice.

He turns back to Suga, who’s looking after the corner Yui had disappeared around, smiling fondly. “Don’t you think she was acting a little… strange?”

“Really?” Suga tilts his head. “Maybe a little. You know her better than I do, though.”

“But you’re better at reading people.” Suga ducks his head at the compliment, but it’s true. Daichi knows he’s oblivious—mainly from the many times Suga has told him so—but that kind of self-awareness doesn’t facilitate becoming any less oblivious. He just knows it’s there, a giant glowing sign over his head he can’t shake off.

“Maybe,” Suga allows, “but experience trumps talent. Do you want yakisoba? I think I do.”

Daichi isn’t sure if they’re talking about Yui anymore—or even lunch, for that matter. For the sake of his nerves he decides to let it go, for now. “It’s not cold enough for yakisoba.”

“It’s always cold enough,” says Suga, tugging at Daichi’s arm. “Come on, we’re going to freeze just standing here.” His fingers circle Daichi’s wrist loosely right where his watch would normally sit; it feels odd to be touched there, where usually no one does. A thin sheen of sweat breaks out on Daichi’s skin. The sun feels hotter suddenly, burning his neck where it’s not covered by his jacket.

“Okay,” says Daichi. His voice croaks a little. Weird, his throat is really dry. He should’ve taken Yui’s offer for some tea earlier.

As they walk to Suga’s favorite yakisoba place, fifteen minutes east, they fall back into a pattern so easily it’s almost frightening. When Suga tells stories, Daichi asks questions in just the right places to make Suga roll his eyes, and when Daichi takes his turn Suga peppers him with questions whenever he pauses for breath so he gets flustered and loses track mid-sentence.

Their shoulders brush as they wait at a crosswalk.  Air rushes around them as bicyclists fly past, fluttering the ends of Suga’s hair and the hem of Daichi’s shirt. Suga kicks a pebble, and as they watch it skitter into the street Daichi’s hit with a sense of rightness: of Suga’s faint body heat at his side, one hand raised to shade his eyes from the sun. It’s odd to think that it hasn’t been this way for Daichi’s entire life. There was a time before they were friends, he knows, but in his mind Suga is a steady burning presence, even when he’s absent. Daichi wouldn’t have it any other way.

True to his word, Suga orders yakisoba, teasing Daichi for having a weak stomach. The people at the tables around them give them sideways glances when Suga laughs too loud, but Daichi doesn’t care, even though they’re at home and will almost definitely see these people again, because his ramen has just the right amount of salt and Suga is laughing with his head thrown back, smiling like he hasn’t on Skype for the last six months.

Only an hour later—or maybe three—they pause near the shrimp plush store to part ways. Daichi watches Suga’s back retreat down the road. It’s going to hurt like hell, he thinks, at the end of summer, when they both have to return to school after six weeks of being together like nothing has changed.

Or maybe it’ll be the opposite: maybe by the end of break, they’ll have proven to themselves that their friendship can stand the test of distance and months, and it’ll be easier to return to school knowing that they’ll stay friends. Yes, that’s it—Daichi decides right then and there.

Except he doesn’t really decide, because he doesn’t have to, he just _knows_. He and Suga are the kind of friends he’s never had before, the kind that stays together for their whole lives. There’s a part of him that burns steady and silver that wouldn’t be there without Suga and everything he’s given to Daichi in the four years they’ve known each other. That kind of bond won’t dissolve on its own.

So he doesn’t waste time dallying; he turns and heads home before he can see Suga’s back disappear around a corner. That kind of lingering look is for saying goodbye, and Daichi rests secure in the knowledge that their farewells will never have that permanence.

***

“I’m adorable,” says Suga, matter-of-factly, his voice tinny through Daichi’s laptop’s speakers. “It’s a powerful thing.”

“Right, of course,” says Daichi. He angles his tiny, squeaky desk chair so he can rest his feet on his unmade bed while he talks, kicking a bit of laundry out of the way as he does. (His second year of university, so far, is unexpectedly messier than the first was.) “How could I forget?”

“Maybe old age is getting to you.”

“I’m younger than you!”

“And what a difference those six months make,” laughs Suga.

“So,” says Daichi, getting back on track, “you abused the power of your cute face to get into third-year anatomy, and then what?”

“Oh, right. Well, one of the girls took off her ring to wash her hands when she came in, and she left it on the sink by accident, so her friend—” Suga’s giggling before he can even reach the punchline, the way he always does when he’s telling his best stories. “He took the ring and put it on the cadaver.”

“Suga, that’s terrible!”

“She found it eventually.” He giggles again. “Half an hour later.”

Daichi allows himself a single, full-body shudder. “You have a terrible sense of humor.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, I can’t follow that story up with much. I haven’t met any cadavers recently. Or ever.”

“Hmm, surprising.”

“I did see Kuroo and Bokuto last weekend,” he says thoughtfully. “There was a small fire.”

“How small?”

“Big enough to set off an alarm, but small enough to put out within five minutes.”

“So, just enough for a good story,” says Suga, grinning. “Tell me everything. How many laws did you break?”

“I’m scared to count,” he admits. “We’re banned from the second-best ramen place near school, though.”

“Now you definitely have to tell me.”

“Can this be used against me someday?” laughs Daichi.

“Maybe. But I won’t! Come on, Sawamura, it’s the college experience.” Suga grins, and his face gets larger on Daichi’s screen as he leans forward, chin on hand. “Spill!”

“Well...” Right on cue, Daichi’s phone buzzes against his desk: _1 new message from Kuroo_. “Oh, no,” he groans.

“What happened?”

“Kuroo’s texting again. I know he’s going to ask if I want to go to the cultural festival, but he knows I’ll only go if—”

Somewhere offscreen on Suga’s end, there’s a flurry of sound. “Kou-chan!” says a familiar voice.

 _Kou-chan?_ Daichi can feel his eye twitch. It always feels wrong to hear Suga called anything but _Suga_ , even by his own family.

“You’d better be ready for dinner,” the mystery person continues, still out of sight. “Practice ran late again and I’m _starving_.”

“You’re the one who signed up for volleyball,” says Suga mildly. “No one’s twisting your arm.”

The camera frame wobbles; Suga makes an indignant noise, and Daichi is treated to a screen full of the back of Oikawa Tooru’s head (and part of his arm) as he flings himself into Suga’s lap.

“I’m on Skype,” Suga points out. “Can this wait?” He wriggles in an attempt to escape, but Oikawa must have an octopus grip, because he manages to get his arms around Suga’s torso to pin him to the couch.

“Ooh, who are you talking to? Someone new?” Oikawa flips around and Daichi can finally see his actual face. He looks mostly the same as Daichi remembers, except a lot closer up. “Oh, it’s you.”

“No need to sound so excited,” says Daichi, not without humor. Oikawa shuffles around, making the laptop shake again as he settles against Suga, who’s bearing it all with a surprising amount of patience. “What brings you here?”

“I live here, Dai-chan.” Well, maybe not that surprising. Suga coughs to hide a laugh. “I don’t charge into people’s rooms unannounced unless I live with them.”

“He’s lying,” says Suga instantly. “He did it all the time last year. By the end of second semester, I decided to just give up and move in with him.”

“Sounds fun,” Daichi laughs. Oikawa nods enthusiastically; Suga makes a face.

“That depends on your definition of ‘fun.’ Ouch!” He jumps and swats at the back of Oikawa’s head as Oikawa smirks. “Hey, move. I’ll be done soon, we can go to dinner then.”

 _Soon?_ Daichi had deliberately left his evening open; he and Suga had spent hours on Skype before, talking or watching a movie simultaneously or just studying with the other’s steady presence in the corner of each other’s laptop screens, listening to Suga’s newest playlist and the sound of pens scratching paper.

“Fine,” Oikawa whines. He releases Suga as he sits up, then winds his arms around Suga’s neck, yanking him over until they’re cheek-to-cheek. “Watch out, Dai-chan. I’m stealing your setter.” He turns and flicks his tongue out to lick Suga on the cheek. Suga yelps and shoves him away—Oikawa drops out of frame with a thud and a wail of “ _Kou-chaaan_ , you’re so mean.”

“Twenty minutes!”

“I’m timing you!”

Suga laughs to himself. Around him, the background tilts, then whirls into motion: he’s walking into his own room, shutting the door behind him. “Sorry,” he says, grinning. “Roommates.”

“I know the feeling,” says Daichi, though he kind of doesn’t. His own roommates are pretty tame by comparison; sometimes on weekends they come in late and knock things over, leaving a minefield for Daichi to navigate in the morning, but that’s about it. They coexist just fine, but they’re not the best-friend type or anything. “At least you’ll never be bored.”

“For sure,” agrees Suga, fervently.

“So what’s it like?”

Suga tilts his head to the side. “What?”

“Being a _blood traitor_ ,” Daichi intones, using his best dramatic voice. The laugh it draws out of Suga is worth the scratch in his throat it leaves. “What would our kouhai say?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to any of them, I don’t think. Actually, I know I haven’t, because Kageyama would’ve broken down my door by now.”

“Did you get that picture from Ennoshita last week?”

“Not everyone is a part of your super-special captain party, Daichi.” Suga rolls his eyes, but there’s no real bite behind it. “No, I didn’t.”

Daichi laughs, reaching for his phone to forward the screenshot. “Oh, it’s a good one.”

The next minutes pass in the blink of an eye as they trade stories about their former kouhai, and Daichi laughs so hard he nearly falls off his chair. Suga is the one to notice that their time is up—well, it’s Oikawa, really, pounding on Suga’s door twenty-five minutes later, shouting about food.

“That’s my cue,” says Suga, a bit ruefully. “I really should go. I forgot to have dinner yesterday, I was so busy studying.”

“Really?” Daichi frowns. That isn’t like Suga, to lose track of time that way. “Suga--”

“Hmm?” Suga looks at him, eyes wide, and the question sticks in Daichi’s throat. _Is everything okay? Do you need anything?_ Because really—how is he supposed to help? He’s three hours away by the fastest train. It’s not like he can hop over for a visit anytime; their schedules are so convoluted that they’ve barely had any time for Skype since the start of their second year of university, much less an actual meeting in-person.

He would put it all aside if Suga needed him, though, and he knows Suga would do the same for him. That was what best friends were for, after all. But still—

“It was good to see you again,” he says instead. “We should do this again, sometime.”

On Suga’s end, Oikawa is talking a mile a minute, something about volleyball and ramen. Suga laughs before turning back to his laptop. “Of course,” he says, smiling. Daichi looks at him, slightly pixelated, and has the sudden urge to slam his laptop shut and run away. He knows every one of Suga’s smiles—a side effect of being his best friend for four years running—and this one is polite, for when Suga’s already halfway out the door and someone calls a farewell a minute too late. It’s detached, a necessary afterthought for the sake of politeness. It feels like a slap in the face.

“Have fun at dinner,” he manages. “Bye, Suga.”

“Bye, Daichi.” And he’s gone.

Daichi sits back in his chair, scrubbing a hand over his face. The feeling in his stomach is something like worry and something like nausea, blended together into a gross all-over feeling that leaves a sour taste on his tongue. He knows he’s overreacting. So there was a miscommunication about how long they’d be on Skype, so Suga made other plans, so what? It’s nothing to lose sleep over. (He’s probably going to lose sleep over it, tonight.)

But what _was_ that?

“Shit,” he announces to his empty room.

“Bad timing?” asks a voice behind him. Daichi whips around in his chair so fast he nearly falls off. His roommate stands in the doorway, frowning. “Sorry, I was going to knock, but I could hear you on Skype, and then...” He shrugs. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Daichi sits back down in his chair, making it squeak in protest. “Why are you back so early? I thought you were going out with Ito-san today.”

“He got sick.” He makes a face. “Almost threw up on me.”

“That sucks.”

His roommate hums in agreement, glancing at the laptop, still open to Skype. He looks as if he’s going to ask something else, but Daichi beats him to it.

“Do you want to grab dinner?” he asks, on impulse. “I haven’t eaten yet.”

He blinks at Daichi in surprise. “Yeah, sure.”

As he grabs his jacket to leave, he glances at his laptop one more time, then does a double take—there’s a new message from Suga.

_it was good to talk to you! :)_

Suga always sends that at the end of his video calls, even if they’ve already said goodbye. Usually Daichi replies in the same vein, and Suga responds with some kind of joke, but this time he hesitates over the keyboard.

His roommate reappears in the doorway, asking if he’s ready to leave, and Daichi flips his laptop shut before heading out the door, leaving the message unanswered.

***

Daichi’s third year of university has hit him with the approximate force of a freight train. He’s somewhere between summer and winter break, but he’ll be damned if he even knows the current date; he only knows what day of the week it is (god help him, it’s only Wednesday), when his next presentation is due (tomorrow morning at ten), which members of his multiple group projects are slacking off (all but one), and how many coffees he’s had today. (Only two. Three, maybe? Okay, he doesn’t even know _that_ anymore.) And on top of all that, he can feel his shoe coming untied for the fourth time today, which has never happened before! Never that many times in a single day! Why now, of all days!

...So maybe stress decreases his coping skills by about a hundred percent.

He pauses at a bench near a coffee shop at the edge of campus, dropping his paper-stuffed bag next to him. _16:20_ , his watch reads. Twenty-five minutes till he has to meet up to finish a group project, so he ducks inside for a snack. No more coffee for the day, though, he tells himself sternly as he waits in line.

His phone buzzes against his leg, and a quick glance makes him want to pull all his hair out. The freshman he was supposed to tutor in economics canceled, but Daichi _needs_ that extra money for groceries this week, after half the lightbulbs in his apartment decided to die within ten days of each other and his roommates all claimed to have bought them last time.

He casts a longing glance at the espresso machine as another text rolls in, this time from a group message.

_hey sawamura did you print out the slides for tomorrow?_

Daichi closes his eyes and breathes deeply. _No I only have the diagrams, you were supposed to print the slides._

_oh i’m out of print credits…_

“Don’t do this,” he mutters, glaring at the little bubble that indicates his group members are typing.

“So...you don’t want anything?” a girl asks, right in front of him.

It’s then that Daichi discovers he’s reached the front of the line. He stammers an apology, stuffing his phone back in his pocket, and manages to rattle off his order as quickly as possible. The (deeply judgmental) gazes of the other people in line bore into his back as he slides into an empty chair to wait, but he doesn’t have time to worry about what they think of him; more texts pop up by the second. Apparently everyone’s run out of print credits at the same time. To top it off, the main printer in the business building is under repairs, and the closest working one is a ten-minute walk from their usual meeting spot.

Daichi drops his phone onto the table and stares at it in defeat, watching his groupmates argue about who’s going to print the project worth _twenty percent of their grade_ , for crying out loud, and seriously considers dropping out of school to become a fisherman, or live under a bridge, or anything else that entails never working on another group project ever again.

“Sawamura! Soy vanilla latte to go.”

The barista who thrusts a cup in his direction has little hearts drawn on her name tag. They match her bright red glasses; they don’t match her unimpressed stare as Daichi says, “Actually, I don’t think this is mine.”

“Are you Sawamura?” He nods. “Well, there aren’t any others. This is yours.”

“But I didn’t...” _Pick your battles, Daichi_ , says a voice in his head. He sighs. “Thanks.”

He squints at the messy handwriting on the cup as he walks away. It’s definitely not his order; he’s taken to drinking his coffee black—no milk, his parents’ lactose intolerance is finally catching up to him—and besides, he doesn’t like vanilla in his coffee. He racks his brain, but none of the eight people on his usual coffee run at his internship do, either. Some hidden corner of his brain just decided he likes vanilla lattes now.

It’s not until he’s halfway across campus and a third of the way through the drink that it hits him: _he_ drinks coffee black and tea with milk; ever since the first month of high school, the one who’s taken his tea untouched and his coffee tooth-rottingly sweet has always been Suga. Suga, his best friend, who he hasn’t had an actual conversation with in—six months? Seven? Maybe even longer, if it’s been long enough for Daichi to forget his favorite coffee order. If Suga were here, he’d probably laugh, and—and—

His footsteps slow, forcing the others on the sidewalk to edge around him with sideways stares. Normally he’d step aside, like any other person capable of walking down a busy street, but Daichi can’t remember the exact curve of Suga’s mouth when he laughs at his own jokes, or the way sunlight glances off his hair on days like today, with the sky searing blue-gray-white.

The loss of those small memories brings back another, flashing across his mind’s eye: Suga rolling up the sleeves of his Karasuno uniform shirt, always better at keeping the creases neat than Daichi was. When cool spring faded into summer heat, Suga would reach out and tug him close without a word, long fingers expertly tucking in the corners of his cuffs. _I’m keeping you presentable_ , he’d say.

Maybe it’s the stress, or the memory colored in fuzzy pastel in his mind, or the icy shock of the realization itself—whatever it is, it makes Daichi’s sudden loneliness agonizing and visceral. It nearly doubles him over right then and there, on the sidewalk outside a subway station with a hundred strangers passing by.

How could he have let this happen? How could Sawamura Daichi go more than a week without his best friend, the only person who could unfailingly make him laugh and yell and slowly, inevitably, become a better person, a person Daichi could not and would not be without him?

Maybe they weren’t as close as Daichi thought, says a small, traitorous voice in his head. Or maybe they never were.

Guilt washes over him then, and he’s as nauseated as he was lonely just a moment before. Busy or otherwise, he knows he should’ve done something to stay in touch. He sees Yui every couple weeks—though that’s different, they’re at the same university—and he doesn’t find it difficult to text Asahi every once in a while, to make sure he hasn’t died of Noya-related stress or anything.

But there’s no use in wallowing in his own guilt, Daichi tells himself, after wallowing for a good ten minutes. He squares his shoulders; the gesture is barely perceptible, but the old trick to boost his confidence, left over from high school when he needed to make himself feel more captain-y, works like a charm. The urge to slap his face Michimiya-style is strong. He could just get over himself, and call Suga right now. Right now!

Except he’s meeting his group in five minutes. (Four now, according to his watch.) But that’s not much of a deterrent; he can call later tonight, easy.

His phone buzzes with a reminder: _study session, 8 PM._

So maybe not tonight. Tomorrow, then—except he’s in and out of class and various study sessions throughout the day. His precious little downtime will be spent alternately getting coffee and power-napping, since he probably won’t get more than five hours of sleep tonight. If only he hadn’t left that last paper till this week, he thinks ruefully as he waits at a crosswalk, tapping his foot in time with the music in his earbuds.

But that’s okay, if he can’t make it today or tomorrow. He has all the days and weeks after that. Just because he can’t find a spot in his mental calendar, doesn’t mean the touch of desperation nudging the edge of his thoughts is justified. He’ll find a bit of time in the next few weeks, at least. And if worse comes to worse, they’ll see each other at winter break… If Daichi even goes home for more than a couple days, if both his bosses will give him time off.

He pushes aside the swirling mess of Suga-related thoughts as he rides the elevator up to the study room. If he’s learned anything in the past two and a half years, it’s that prioritizing is key, and he’ll never be able to call Suga if he (and his GPA) don’t survive the next few weeks. But surely there’ll be time for him to call Suga soon. They’re only in college. He has all the time in the world.

***

All of Daichi’s friends want to torture him—a fact that becomes apparent as Ennoshita slides into a chair across from him with three cones in hand: rocky road for himself, French vanilla for Asahi, and lemon sorbet for Daichi.

“Thanks,” says Daichi, trying not to sound too disappointed as he accepts the sorbet (and subsequently, the beginning of a lifetime of dairy-free ice cream alternatives).

“I’m so sorry, Daichi,” says Asahi. He cradles his tiny cone delicately. “I didn’t realize you couldn’t have any.”

Daichi shrugs. “It’s not that bad, most of the time.”

“At least you don’t have to work here. Both my parents are allergic, so I’m just waiting for it to happen.” The other two make sympathetic noises as Ennoshita takes off his work apron, slinging it over the back of his chair. “Anyway, how have you been? Aside from the milk thing.”

Asahi’s already said his spiel about his job at Sakanoshita—Ukai is the same as ever, business is good, Asahi fears an early death via secondhand smoke—so they both turn to Daichi. He stares at his sorbet, considering.

“Fourth year is a lot less stressful than third was,” he begins diplomatically. “I got a different internship. I’m pretty busy, but it’s all good, I guess.” Ennoshita flicks a bit of paper napkin at him.

“Thrilling,” he deadpans, and Daichi laughs. “You’ve got to have a real life somewhere in there. What’s happened since winter break?”

The lemon sorbet feels particularly cold in his stomach just then. He’s not quite sure how to articulate the way he sometimes feels when he’s walking through campus, enjoying the summer breeze across his skin, when out of nowhere a feeling of profound _emptiness_ hits him all at once, a gaping void in his torso where there should be organs, and normal feelings, probably, instead of weird soul-sucking ones.

He’s also not sure he should dump all those emotions on Ennoshita at once. They’re pretty good friends, but they’re not close like he is with Asahi or Yui, or… anyone else in particular.

“Nothing,” he says instead. He looks up, and his friends are wearing matching expressions, mixtures of puzzlement and concern.

Ennoshita looks skeptical. “Nothing at all?”

“What?” Daichi can feel his shoulders start to hunch up and forces them back down, sitting up straighter. “It’s true. I’ve got a different internship, but that’s it.”

“Whatever you say.” Ennoshita shrugs, returning his attention to his ice cream. “Hey, what’s Suga up to?”

“Suga?” Is Daichi more transparent than he thought? But Ennoshita isn’t the nosy type—it’s probably not a loaded question, just a polite one.

“Yeah. He’s usually with you guys, is he staying at school for the break?”

“He is,” says Asahi, to Daichi’s surprise. “He’s working at a hospital.”

“He is?” asks Daichi. Apparently he’s lost the ability to form original sentences. “How do you know?”

“I...asked him?” Asahi looks puzzled. “I talked to him a few weeks ago. He said he’s really busy, since he’s only halfway through school. He still has three years left.”

“Oh.” The sorbet is starting to go soft around the edges, so Daichi shoves some in his mouth without thinking and coughs at the cold. “I didn’t know that,” he says after he recovers.

“You didn’t know he was pre-med?” asks Ennoshita.

“No, I knew that, he’s my—” _He’s my best friend_ , Daichi is about to say, but no, that’s not true anymore. A best friend wouldn’t fill up his free time with everything he could think of, instead of picking up a phone to actually speak to said best friend. “I haven’t talked to him in a while, that’s all.”

“How long?”

“I texted him about coming home for New Year’s?”

He suppresses a wince at the way Ennoshita’s eyes widen fractionally—roughly the equivalent of gasping out loud, for him.

“Huh,” says Ennoshita after a beat of silence.

“What?”

He shrugs. “That’s a little surprising, I guess. I thought you guys seemed close in high school.”

“Well, yeah.” Daichi glances at Asahi. “All three of us were.”

“That was different, though,” says Asahi.

“Was it?” asks Daichi.

“Yeah, of course.” Daichi turns to stare, but Asahi is concentrating on his ice cream, chewing happily.

“Why would that be?”

“Well, you know. Because of Suga’s—” Asahi catches sight of his blank expression and freezes mid-bite. “Oh. _Oh_.”

Daichi stares. Ennoshita glances between them. “I think I missed something,” he says.

“Same here,” says Daichi, narrowing his eyes. “Asahi, what don’t I know?”

“Ah… I don’t know if I should say,” he hedges.

“I can leave,” says Ennoshita mildly.

“No, no! It’s okay.” Asahi darts a nervous look around the (empty) ice cream shop. Their voices echo, but there’s no one around to eavesdrop, a fact that seems to give him the courage to continue. “It was a long time ago, kind of.”

“Wait, nothing’s wrong, right?” asks Daichi. “Did someone have a horrible accident we didn’t hear about?”

“No! At least, I don’t think so. I hope not…”

“Then tell us.”

Asahi hesitates for what seems like ten years, but is probably more like several seconds. Daichi is prepared to tear out his own hair by the time he finally speaks.

“Suga—had feelings for you, in high school,” he blurts, and promptly hunches over the last of his ice cream.

Distantly, Daichi hears a spoon clatter to the table—probably his own, though he doesn’t remember dropping it. “He _what_?”

“Oh, that’s it?” Ennoshita looks disappointed.

“Don’t tell him I told you,” begs Asahi, twisting his hands together. “I wasn’t supposed to say.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” demands Daichi, recovering. Ennoshita blinks at him innocently. “You knew?”

“What, that Suga-san is gay—”

“He’s bi,” Asahi corrects, meekly.

“—or how he felt about you?”

“The second one,” he manages, and is thankful that his voice doesn’t croak like it feels it will.

“I don’t know, it was always pretty clear to me.” Ennoshita looks extremely calm for just having informed someone that he knew about a _life-changing secret_ for literal _years_ and _never told anyone_. “He was pretty good at hiding it, though. The others probably weren’t able to tell. Except Kiyoko-san, she knew.”

“Kiyoko knows?!”

“Definitely,” says Ennoshita as Asahi nods.

“But…” Thoughts are firing through Daichi’s head at about a million miles an hour, whipping past too quickly to pin any one down. “He’s—we’re—we were—best friends.”

“I shouldn’t have told you,” frets Asahi. “Suga’s going to kill me.”

“I can’t believe he hadn’t figured it out, honestly,” Ennoshita says to him. “He’s even worse than I thought.”

It takes a moment for his words to filter through the tornado in Daichi’s brain. “What, me?”

Ennoshita raises a single eyebrow. “You have ‘oblivious’ stamped on your forehead, Sawamura. You didn’t realize Michimiya-san liked you either, and that was for years.”

“At least I got that one in the end,” he splutters. Yui had teased him for weeks when she found out he’d never realized. Oh god, she probably knew too. Had someone told her, or did she figure it out herself?

A moment later he realizes another thing he doesn’t know: “Asahi, how long?”

“How long did Micchan like you?” Asahi frowns. “I don’t know. Suga guessed it started in middle school, but we never found out for sure.”

“No, I mean Suga.”

Asahi hesitates again, looking anywhere but at him. “I shouldn’t say.”

“You’ve already said too much!” Asahi wilts. Ennoshita snorts. “No—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay, but I really shouldn’t say.”

Daichi stares at the tabletop. Yui had liked him for _years_ before they’d dated (for a bit, and subsequently decided to stay friends and nothing more). There’s no way Suga could have—felt the way he did, for that long. He and Suga had met at the beginning of high school, but if it had been that long, Daichi would have noticed at some point... Maybe it had only been right before they’d graduated, which might explain how Ennoshita knew.

A new thought occurs to him then, and it feels like his stomach has dropped to the floor. “Asahi—does he _still_?”

Asahi shoves his chair back from the table, making the legs screech against the tile. “I’m getting more ice cream!”

“Asahi—” Daichi turns a pleading gaze on Ennoshita, but right as he’s about to answer, the door of the ice cream parlor bursts open. A gaggle of children tumbles in, all shouting over each other, their mothers trailing behind. Ennoshita stands and plucks his apron off his chair.

“Back to work,” he says, and practically runs back to the register.

“Hey!”

But there’s nothing he can do for another ten minutes, at least, as Ennoshita scoops approximately five thousand ice creams for all the kids and their parents.

Daichi looks down at his hands. Oddly, they’re not shaking, even though he feels weird and trembly all over. There are so many things swirling through his head that he doesn’t know what to feel first: embarrassment for not realizing sooner, guilt for leading Suga on for—however long he’d cared for Daichi. More guilt as he remembers all the people who’d asked if they were dating, especially during third year. God, he’s a terrible friend.

“Daichi!”

Daichi nearly jumps out of his skin. Asahi and Ennoshita have retaken their seats across from him and are staring like he might explode at any moment. Judging from their expressions, this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to get his attention. “Sorry, what?”

“Are you okay?” asks Ennoshita.

“Of course,” he says immediately. “Why—why wouldn’t I be?”

“I think you’re right,” Asahi whispers to Ennoshita.

“Always am,” he says drily. “Alright, you two are on your own.”

“What?”

“I have other customers, and you’re taking up the biggest table.” Ennoshita makes a shooing motion at them. Daichi and Asahi shuffle toward the door, and as they leave Ennoshita calls, “You can come back when you sort out your feelings!”

“Great,” says Daichi, packing as much sarcasm as he can muster into the word. “See you soon.”

“Not soon enough,” says Ennoshita, and the door slams.

A few minutes later, as they part ways at an intersection between their houses, Asahi asks, “What are you going to do now?”

“Do you mean today, or…?”

Asahi nods. Daichi suppresses a sigh.

“I have no idea. About either.”

“Good luck,” he says. Daichi can’t help but smile at that; from anyone else the words would only be polite, but Asahi doesn’t know how to be anything but sincere.

He’d kind of hoped to spend the rest of the day laying on his bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling and questioning every decision he’d made in the past six years, but the universe has other plans for him—or at least, his mother does. So Daichi bikes all over town, and every shop window, intersection, billboard, cyclist makes him think of Suga. When he finally returns home—with great relief, he’d nearly had a crisis over onions in the middle of the supermarket, stress affects his decision-making a _lot_ sometimes—he changes and slips out the door, headed for a run along his old route from high school.

Back then it was a cooldown after practice or a break from studying. Even though it’s different now, it still clears his mind as effectively as it always has; the repetitive motion is soothing. There is only the breeze on his skin and the slap of his shoes on the pavement.

As minutes tick by and his breathing steadies, thoughts filter back into his consciousness, slow enough that he can examine each one.

 _Suga was in love with me._ The thought makes his toes curl and jitters crawl under his skin; he doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge. He wants to hold it delicately, keep it safe, but he also kind of wants to hide.

 _If I had known before, what would have changed?_ He jogs faster. Maybe he could have—asked Suga out, or something. It seems so superficial, though, and the last thing he’d want is for Suga to think he doesn’t take _them_ seriously, or that Daichi pities him.

As he makes his way up a hill, a nagging whisper trickles through: _this isn’t a normal response_. Most people would probably forget about it, brush it off as a thing of the past. Granted, most people don’t have the kind of relationship he and Suga had, but still, the thought itches him. Part of him wants to push it away, prioritize it below everything else—but he’s been doing that with all these other thoughts for months, and look where it’s gotten him (nowhere).

He runs until only one thought remains, the first, last, and most persistent by far. It keeps popping up in his brain like a flashing neon sign no matter how he tries to squash it. _How do_ I _feel?_

There’s a creeping feeling on the back of his neck, almost like he’s being followed, except he knows there’s no one else around. The feeling is similar to the one he gets when he knows a storm is coming, sees the clouds brewing in the distance, feels anticipatory pinpricks of rain on his skin. So Daichi runs and runs, away from the storm, towards something else, he doesn’t know what.

But it has to end eventually; Daichi notes the burn in his lungs after a while, he’s getting out of volleyball shape. He pauses at a deserted park—school isn’t yet out for the day. He splashes some water from a drinking fountain on his face, letting it drip onto his shirt as he stares at the swings creaking slightly in the breeze. The sight recalls his mother’s voice when he was very young, telling him to be careful, not to jump off at the top of his arc like all the other kids, didn’t he know he would break his neck? And he remembers doing it anyway, and the plummeting sensation in his gut as he free-fell through the air.

The calm that settled in during his run fades the longer he stands still. A dozen moments from the past six years replay in his head—small things, things Daichi had always interpreted as best-friend things, now colored with the new light of realization. The looks their teammates exchanged sometimes, when they thought Daichi didn’t see. _Suga-san is the only one who can lecture Dai-san like that._ That time a boy at the cultural festival gave Suga his phone number; the sick, nervous (jealous) feeling that settled in the pit of his stomach. His own words, reflected in his memory. _Even if we had the biggest team in the prefecture, I’d still choose you._

And Suga looking at him with his head tilted to one side, when Daichi told him he wanted to quit volleyball after the Inter-High preliminaries. _Is that really how you feel, Daichi?_

 _No!_ He shuts his eyes. _I want to play volleyball with you!_

There is no avoiding this truth: he loves Sugawara Koushi. Before this he has been too nearsighted to see, or maybe just too frightened, but now the admission burns from his forehead to his toes, sending shivers down his spine. He loves Suga—is in love with Suga— _has been_ in love with Suga for who knows how long. Daichi knows himself well enough now that he recognizes the impossibility of denying this.

There is no one around but the playground and the trees, but his heart races as if he’s actually confessed. He wonders, distantly, if anyone else had guessed at his feelings. Obviously Asahi and Ennoshita saw more clearly than he did, but maybe even his parents knew too, from the way their son aligned himself with this other boy, fell in step beside him and chose to stay. What will they say? How does he tell them?

More urgently: how does he tell Suga? Does he tell him at all?

As he starts up his run again, he imagines taking out his phone and calling Suga—or better yet, running into him somewhere, so he can stutter like an idiot in person. His brain unhelpfully supplies every scenario at once. In Sendai, in Karasuno’s old gym, in Tokyo outside the business building, anywhere. What would he say? _I’m sorry_ , or _I had no idea_ , or _will you go out with me?_

Oh god, he can’t say that. There’s no way. Suga would laugh at him from now till the end of the world.

But would he? Asahi had practically evacuated the building when Daichi had asked if Suga still had feelings for him; he’d never answered the question. It’s a lot to hope—it’s foolish to dare think—but maybe his non-answer was answer enough.

He’ll drive himself mad if he follows that train of thought. Too much speculation, not enough facts. And yet… He thinks of Suga again, and of his favorite soft blue scarf, always tucked around his neck in the winter. Of how he might look if Daichi confessed: eyes wide, lips curving into a smile. _Stop doing that, Sawamura_ , he thinks, trying for stern and coming up resigned.

Daichi imagines winding his hands into that scarf, leaning in close, calling him _Koushi_.

His face burns. He breaks into a sprint.

***

Sawamura Daichi, 1994-2016, died of spontaneous combustion while attempting to make a phone call. That’s what his obituary is going to say, Daichi decides as he paces back and forth in front of a bench near the edge of campus. He’s never been one for pacing, really, but he has so much pent-up energy he’s going to explode if he doesn’t do something.

That something should really be pressing a button and _calling Suga_ , like a normal, well-adjusted individual. Which he is! Daichi is very well-adjusted. He uses Google Calendars, and drinks tea instead of coffee in a half-assed attempt to kick his caffeine addiction, and—wears a watch every day. He’s an _adult_ (mostly). So why can’t he make one phone call? It’ll take fifteen minutes, tops, and his schedule is clear for the rest of the day. So really, there’s nothing holding him back. Nothing at all.

Except.

It’s been over two months since he finally acknowledged his own feelings, and since then he’s been too much a coward to do anything but run around Tokyo pining in silence. (That’s what Kuroo had called it, to Daichi’s dismay. “Because that’s what you’re doing,” he’d said. “Pining harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s sad. _You’re_ sad.”) He would have been perfectly happy—well, mostly content—to keep doing that indefinitely, because, as he’s told Yui at least three times now, he can’t say anything to Suga. Not now, three and a half years after high school, nearly a year since they’ve had a real conversation. It would be unfair to bring back memories from so long ago: unfair to himself, and especially to Suga, who probably got over those feelings years ago.

Not that he knows this for certain. It’s an educated guess, a guess that keeps him up at night and distracts him during class. He keeps running scenarios over and over, imagining what could happen if he said this or Suga said that, if Suga moved to Tokyo, if Daichi had the courage to acknowledge the facts glaring him in the face before he’d gone and lost his best friend in the world.

It’s pretty fucking awful. He’s never done this before, because Daichi isn’t _like_ this. He doesn’t do this spiral of blame-regret-wish-blame that he’s been doing for the past two months. (Or maybe longer, judging by the look Yui gives him when he mentions it.)

But now here he is, staring one of the dreaded scenarios right in the face: in a week and a half he’ll be attending a conference in Sendai. He’d agreed to it back when all the other interns did the same, but he’s managed to stress himself out about it for an entire week without actually doing anything. Or asking anyone else what to do about it, for that matter. He’s afraid that if he speaks the possibility aloud it’ll make it more real.

 _Don’t let opportunity pass you by_ , his boss had told him recently. _You’re young and you have time, but some things only come around once._ She’d been talking about networking opportunities at the conference, but the advice was a lot more applicable to Daichi’s life than she realized.

He stops pacing, squares his shoulders. He makes phone calls all the time! He’ll think of it like another appointment reminder or fundraising pitch. Sendai, Saturday, sometime after five. This will be easy.

Caught up in a rush of determination, he jabs the little call icon next to Suga’s name… and immediately regrets it. He resigns himself to his fate as the phone rings, alternately hoping Suga will pick up immediately and wondering if maybe Suga’s thrown his phone into the Pacific Ocean and will never receive another call again—

“Hello?”

“Suga,” says Daichi, in a rush. The tips of his fingers are tingling. Suga sounds exactly the same, even tinny through a phone speaker. “It’s—it’s me.”

“Yes, Daichi, I know.”

“What?” His eyes snap open, and heat floods his face. “Oh, you mean your contacts. I mean, yeah, I know that. No, I know you know, it’s—wait—” Suga is laughing at him. Daichi can’t even muster up proper embarrassment, he’s so stupidly happy to hear Suga’s laugh again. “Let’s start over,” he says, straightening his shoulders, even though Suga can’t see him. “Hi, Suga.”

“Hi, Daichi.” He knows what Suga must look like right now, fingers resting on his lips, trying not to laugh. “How have you been?”

“I’m... pretty good, thanks. And you?”

“I’m great, actually.” Daichi flinches, then shakes the motion off, trying hard to act like it didn’t happen. “Is there a reason you called, other than to test my caller ID?”

“Yeah.” The residual warm feeling in his chest disappears under an onslaught of nervousness. “I’m going to be in Sendai next weekend, there’s a conference I’m going to. So if you’re free to… get food or something, that would be, uh. Cool? Really cool,” he says, and hates himself.

“It would be cool,” Suga agrees. Daichi wishes for death. “Saturday works for me, anytime after six.”

“Me, too.” The tingling in his fingertips is spreading to the rest of him, warming him inside-out. “So… dinner, then?”

“I know a place.”

“Great,” he says, and hopes he doesn’t sound too earnest. There’s a pause then, and Daichi is hyper-aware of himself: the pace of his breathing, his hand starting to sweat against his phone.

“Great,” Suga echoes, and Daichi’s pretty sure he isn’t imagining the smile in his voice. “I’ll see you then.”

“Okay. Suga—”

“Hmm?”

Shit. He doesn’t actually have anything to say. He just doesn’t want to hang up yet, wants to keep hearing Suga’s voice in his ear as he walks the rest of the way to his apartment. This is, he realizes, kind of tragic, and not really something he’d care to admit aloud. “Uh. Take care.”

“You, too.”

“Yeah, I will.” He scrunches his nose at the way he’s managed to prolong their conversation. “Bye, Suga.”

“Bye, Daichi.”

The call disconnects. Distantly, he knows he probably looks like an idiot, grinning down at his phone like a twelve-year-old with a first crush, but he doesn’t really care; he won’t see any of these passersby ever again.

Then he realizes what he’s done, and embarrassment punches him all over again. He’s made a dinner date—is date the right word? It’s not really a date, it’s just… plans. Dinner plans. With his best friend. (Former best friend, ouch.) It’s fine. It’s all fine!

Nothing is fine. He feels like he’s going to throw up, or maybe burst into flames. Really sad flames of terror and awkwardness and shame.

So he does the logical thing: he thumbs through his contacts, careful to not redial Suga by mistake, and makes a call.

***

“I’m an idiot,” he groans half an hour later, slumped in his chair across from Yui. They’re at his favorite lunch place—inexpensive, close to campus, and decent pork buns to boot—but not even the promise of impending shoyu ramen can cheer him up.

“You are,” agrees Yui, not without sympathy. She unwinds her scarf to hang over the back of her chair. “What have you done now?”

He feels a little spike of indignation. “How do you know it’s something _I_ did?”

Yui gives him an unimpressed look. “Daichi, I could barely understand you on the phone. You sounded like you were about to pass out.”

“It felt like I was going to,” he admits, after a pause. “I still do, kind of.” Yui pushes his glass toward him meaningfully.

“Come on, tell me everything.” She pats his hand to make him stop fiddling compulsively with his chopsticks. “It’s No Judgment Time.”

Daichi takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the nearest table’s ramen. It’s a silly little thing they have, something Yui came up with back in high school, but it means something that they’ve both carried on the tradition through all these years. No Judgment Time only makes an appearance when it really counts. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

He exhales, shaky. “So I’ve already told you about the, uh, Suga thing, so I can skip that, right?”

She hums, thoughtful. “It’s been a while. Define ‘the Suga thing.’”

“Yui,” he protests.

“Daichi,” she replies, undaunted. She’s merciless today, but that’s probably what he needs right now.

“Nothing’s changed since the last time I talked to you. I still haven’t spoken to him in almost a year.” He pauses, double-checking his mental calculations, and takes a gulp of water for strength. “Until now, I guess.”

“Until—” Yui sits bolt upright, eyes wide. “Did he call you? Wait—did you call _him_?” At his nod, she leans over the table to grab his wrist in excitement, shaking his arm. “That’s so great! I’m proud of you!”

“Thanks?”

“I mean it! I’m going to buy you dessert, you’ve earned it.”

Daichi can’t help but laugh, even though he still feels vaguely nauseous. It had been a good decision to call Yui, of all his friends; her indomitable good humor is always contagious to some degree, and she could be relied upon to give him straight advice in the way that only one’s oldest friends could.

“So what happened?” Yui rests her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. “Tell me! What did you say? Wait, why did you call? Did you confess?”

He rocks back slightly under the onslaught of questions. “There isn’t much to tell, honestly. I’m going to be in Sendai next weekend for a conference, and I thought I couldn’t let it pass without seeing him, so I just—called. I don’t know why I didn’t text,” he adds, frowning at the table. “I didn’t think of it, I guess.”

“Come on,” says Yui, waving her hands in a _fast forward_ gesture. “Focus! What did he say?”

“Not much.” He remembers Suga’s laugh in his ear, and his cheeks warm. “We’re going to get dinner. He said he knows a place. And… that’s all, really.”

“That’s all?”

“I said there wasn’t much to tell,” he reminds her, defensive.

“Yeah, but still.” She sits back, pouting for a moment before she brightens again. “Hey, it wasn’t so bad after all, was it? Finally talking to him.”

He recalls the nausea rolling in his stomach, still not completely gone, even though it’s been almost an hour since. “It was terrifying.”

She makes a sympathetic noise. “I’m sorry.”

 _Well, it wasn’t that bad_ , he wants to say, but instead of telling that blatant lie he just groans and rests his head on the table. “It was bad,” he says to the cool metal tabletop. “I don’t even remember what I said exactly. I was so nervous, I just—said some stuff, and at the end we had plans.” He catches the sideways glances of the surrounding tables and sits up properly. “What am I going to do when I actually get there? What do I _say_?”

“You don’t have any ideas?”

“None.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here,” says Yui brightly. “To help you along.”

The food arrives, and the conversation pauses while Daichi shoves some ramen into his mouth in the hopes that it’ll calm his stomach. Mostly it just burns his mouth.

They eat in contented silence for a while before Yui goes straight for the kill shot.

“You have to tell him.”

“No,” he says immediately.

She frowns. The expression has always looked out of place on her, she’s so bright and sunshiney otherwise. “Daichi.”

“I can’t do that!” He jabs his chopsticks at his ramen with more force than necessary. “He can’t know. He—” He breaks off, winded by rising panic. The nausea has returned in full force.

“Deep breath,” she says gently. He takes a moment to close his eyes, breathe through his nose.

“I can’t tell him,” he says when he recovers. “It—it’ll ruin what we have.” Or, what little he and Suga might still have, if their relationship hasn’t frayed beyond repair.

“Do you really think that?”

“I don’t know.” He slumps. “I just don’t want to give him the wrong idea.”

“That’s the point,” says Yui, exasperation mixing with the affection in her tone. “Telling him would give the _right_ idea.”

“But what if he’s dating someone already?” His voice is rising, but the restaurant is pretty noisy, so he doesn’t bother lowering it. “I don’t even know if he’s with anyone right now. I can’t impose on that.”

She makes a face that’s like half a wince, before she stops herself. “The last time I talked to him, it kind of seemed like he was...with someone,” she admits. For a scary moment, Daichi is so jealous it hurts—imagining this phantom person spending time with Suga, lucky enough to be in his presence—and he nearly misses Yui’s next words. “It didn’t sound serious, though! And it was back in the spring, that was months ago. He might not be seeing them anymore.”

Daichi feels sick again. “Yeah, I’m not telling him.”

“You have to!”

“I could fix things. I _want_ to fix things, I want to apologize.” He stares at his hands, knotted together on the tabletop. “I can’t mess it up with—with _that_.”

Yui leans forward, intent. “That’s what I’m saying, Daichi. You can fix it. This could be your best chance to set things straight. You’ve figured out what you want, finally—”

“Hey,” he says, without any real heat, because it’s true.

“—and now you get a chance to _maybe_ have it. Some people, they don’t get that chance. But you do.”

“I don’t know…”

“Daichi.” He looks up, startled at the change in her tone, and she fixes him with her _captain_ stare, the fiery one that matches his own. When Yui gets like this she can fill an entire room with her presence; it feels like the only people in the entire restaurant are the two of them, having this singular conversation. “You’re acting like you’ve already lost everything. And you have lost a lot already, don’t forget that—but not everything. This isn’t over yet. Don’t act like it is.”

“That’s volleyball advice,” he protests feebly.

“It still applies, and you know it!”

He does. Yui, he reflects distantly, is altogether too good at getting him to do things he doesn’t want to do. “How would I even bring it up?”

“You’ll figure it out. I believe in you.” Her words are light, but they ring with sincerity.

“Thanks,” he mutters.

“So will you do it? Tell Suga?” Daichi can tell she’s eager, but she’s holding back, giving him room to make his own decision. They possess enough maturity and respect to do that for each other now.

She really does believe in him, that he’s capable of scraping together enough courage to try and repair this thing he’s let rust over. How Suga will respond is out of his control, but he’ll never even have a chance if Daichi doesn’t get to his feet and act. “Yes,” he says, on an exhale, breath shaking a little as it leaves him. “Yeah, I will.”

“I know you can do it.” Yui beams, and he smiles back, rueful. “So where do you want to go for dessert? I was serious about that, you know.”

As it turns out, she pretty much decides for him; when they’re finished with lunch and walking back to campus she pulls him into a little bakery tucked between two skyscrapers. She buys him some kind of chocolate cake (no dairy, he checks), and he munches it as they make their way back toward her apartment.

“Thanks,” he tells her when they reach her door, as she digs around in her bag for her keys, muttering to herself. “Really, for everything. You’re the best.”

She pauses in her search and grins up at him. Her hair sticks out around the edges of her bright red beanie. “You’re welcome!” After a moment her expression relaxes into something fonder, and she reaches up on tiptoe to ruffle his hair. He scrunches his face in response. “You’ll be fine, Daichi. Now get out there! Knock ‘em dead!”

“God, I hope not.”

***

Night has fallen sticky in Sendai, despite the November chill; the humidity is only relieved by the smallest breeze lifting off the ocean. As they walk back toward Suga’s apartment, Suga shivers, jamming his hands into his pockets. He isn’t wearing gloves. He’s always run a bit cold, Daichi remembers, which worked out well for them—Daichi was always warm, so Suga used to use him like a space heater.

“Here,” he says, breaking their (mostly) comfortable silence to unwind the scarf around his neck. “Take this.”

Suga raises an eyebrow at him. “Oh, I finally get that back?”

“What?” Daichi pauses mid-motion.

“My scarf.” Suga nods at it, and Daichi flushes hot from his forehead to his neck. His memory, which had previously failed him, now supplies him with the faint recollection of Suga wearing this same scarf in their first year of high school, before he’d loaned it to Daichi too close to the end of winter and it had gotten shoved into a closet with the rest of Daichi’s winter clothes. “You could have just kept it, you know.” He sounds more amused than annoyed.

“Well, I know now,” mumbles Daichi. Suga bites back a laugh as he accepts the scarf.

“Thanks. I’d nearly forgotten about it, myself.”

They lapse back into quiet, listening to the sound of their footsteps on the pavement. The streets are alive with activity. Dinner had been late, to accommodate the conference Daichi had been at all day, but it’s still early enough that couples and clusters of young people clutter the sidewalks. Their conversation had been… The only way Daichi can really describe it is _nice_ : it was pleasant, sure, and words had flowed more easily between them than he had dared hope, but there was no real substance. Suga had told him all about his semester so far, labs and internships and hospital stories, yet Daichi doesn’t really know how _Suga_ is. He can’t figure out the words to ask, and it bothers him.

Suga’s apartment building is nondescript, gray cement sandwiched by other similar structures. They pause outside the door, staring at each other for a moment, and Daichi has the sudden, childish fear that if he speaks first it’ll be his fault if too much time passes between this goodbye and their next meeting. Just as he’s plucking up courage, though, Suga speaks instead.

“It was good to see you again.” Suga smiles at him, and Daichi’s heart seizes in his chest.

“You, too,” he says. It feels inadequate, so he adds, “Let me know if you’re ever in Tokyo.” He doesn’t miss the way Suga’s smile flickers before he nods. He’ll never have any real reason to be in Tokyo, they both know this.

Suga turns to leave. In the yellowish light of the streetlamps his hair looks almost gold where it curls against the collar of his jacket. Panic overtakes Daichi; he can’t stay here, paralyzed by hesitation, when Suga is two steps away and he still _doesn’t know._ “Wait—Suga, don’t…”

He reaches for Suga’s arm. Suga visibly flinches away, and Daichi recoils.

Half-turned to face him, Suga stops. His expression is unreadable. “Don’t what?”

“I came here to tell you something,” says Daichi in a rush, “and I haven’t said it yet.” Suga tilts his head to one side; Daichi presses on, determined to finish. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, and—you’re really important to me. I don’t think I’ve told you that.”

“What are you doing?” Suga looks at him warily. It _hurts_ , to see someone who used to be his best friend looking at him with that kind of guardedness.

 _I don’t know_ , he resists the urge to say, because that’s not true. Not anymore. “I’m trying to make things right. I’ve… made a lot of mistakes, with us, and I want to fix them.”

Suga turns to face him fully, and Daichi recognizes this countenance now: Suga is angry. He hides it well, but Daichi knows him even better. “What is there to fix, between us?”

Daichi is caught off guard by that—what isn’t there to fix? At this point, what can’t be changed? They can pick up where they left off, or start anew—the possibilities are boundless. The magnitude of such potential overwhelms him, and in his moment of hesitation Suga shakes his head.

“We’re not having this conversation out here,” he says abruptly. “It’s too cold.” And when he turns and marches toward his apartment building, Daichi has no choice but to follow without a word.

A single lamp is on in Suga’s apartment, dimly illuminating the small living room. Despite his anxiousness Daichi is momentarily distracted by the motion of Suga shrugging his coat off, his shoulders moving under the fabric of his shirt. This isn’t the time to be noticing such things, he chastises himself, tearing his gaze away.

“You can sit,” says Suga, stiffly. He moves away into the half-darkness of the apartment. Daichi can hear him calling out softly, looking for Oikawa; earlier he’d mentioned they were still sharing a place. They’re lucky, they must be good roommates.

He sits on the couch and leans back, hands on his thighs, trying not to sink into the cushions too much. He looks around at the small living room like it’ll give him answers he couldn’t discern at dinner. Over there in a corner is a pile of laundry; on the table there’s a pile of notes covered in Suga’s neat handwriting—he’s been studying for something on-and-off while he watches TV.

Suga returns, having deposited his jacket in his bedroom. He flips on another lamp so they’re bathed in soft light. He sits on the opposite end of the couch and tucks his feet between the cushions, pulling his knees up in front of him: a physical barrier to complement the emotional ones.

“No one else is here,” he says after a long moment of scrutiny. “Explain.”

Daichi shifts so he can face him, turned diagonally on the couch, and resists the urge to knot his hands together. “I’ve been thinking recently,” he begins slowly. “When I realized that we weren’t… that I hadn’t talked to you in a long time. It was a while ago, but I didn’t call you, because—I was scared.” Suga narrows his eyes. “Of what you’d say, I guess. And it’s one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made, letting all that time pass when I didn’t do anything. So I’m sorry, for that.” He swallows hard against the words sticking in his throat. “You don’t have to forgive me, I just—I wanted to say that.”

He’s been staring at the curve of Suga’s ear as he speaks, too afraid to look him in the eye, but he does now, just in time to see Suga shaking his head. It’s a small motion, but it’s all that needs to be said (or unsaid).

Daichi’s stomach twists. So Suga won’t forgive him. It’s… not fine at all, really, but he’ll live. He bows his head, staring down at the space between them. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and shifts his weight forward to stand and leave.

“Wait.”

He pauses, still seated. Suga’s looking at him with his brow furrowed. “What?”

“You’re not the only one to blame for this.” A weight lifts off Daichi’s chest, letting him breathe until Suga speaks again. “So don’t talk about it like it’s all on you.” He catches Daichi’s confused look and shifts, uncrossing his arms to gesture between them. “This goes two ways,” he says. “You didn’t call, but neither did I.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

A moment passes as Suga waits for him to say something, but all he can manage is, “I didn’t realize.”

The moment the words leave his mouth, Daichi realizes this is not the right thing to say.

“You didn’t?” Suga’s mouth twists almost like he’s trying to smile. “What, did you think you could just—come here, walk in and say that, and everything would go back to the way it used to be?” His voice is rising, an angry red flush spreads over his cheeks. Daichi flinches back. “Do you think I’ve just been sitting here, waiting for you to come back?”

“No—no, of course not—”

“Good,” he snaps. “Because I haven’t. That’s why I never called you: I have a life here, and it’s _good_. I have _moved on_ , Daichi.” His words are a slap in the face.

“I don’t doubt that, just—” Daichi reaches to grab at his hair in frustration and finds that his hands are shaking. “I’m trying, I am, but I don’t know how to—I can’t...” He’s never been the most emotionally expressive, but words have been doing this lately—failing him, especially when he’s trying to sort out his feelings. Now at this crucial moment they evade his grasp and only make the situation worse. “Suga...” His voice comes out hoarse, strange to his own ears. _Please understand_ , he thinks with all his might, hoping the remnants of best-friend telepathy will serve him. _I can’t tell you, I can’t think. Give me this chance. Please._

Suga’s expression softens infinitesimally: he’s clearly still frustrated, but he sees what’s happening, and a little bubble of hope swells in Daichi’s chest, giving him voice.

When he finally speaks, he feels very small. “Have you really moved on? Can you not turn back?”

Some emotion flashes across Suga’s face. Daichi can’t pinpoint what it is before it’s gone, replaced by affront. “No, I can’t,” says Suga, flushing darker with what seems like more anger, but Daichi knows something now, saw it in that split second: this is a lie.

“Suga…”

Suga presses away from him, back into the arm of the couch. “What?”

“If you won’t forgive me, just say so.” Daichi imagines himself offering up his words with both hands. “Just say it, and I’ll leave. I won’t bother you again.”

Suga’s eyes widen, and he stares for a moment before his gaze flicks down fractionally to his knees, still pulled up in front of his chest. He’s quiet so long that Daichi begins to wonder if he intends silence as his answer.

But just as he’s accepted this as truth, Suga speaks.

“I can forgive you.” He looks up to meet Daichi’s eye. “I will.” Daichi lets his eyes fall closed. Relief sags his posture, previously ramrod-straight with nervousness, and he lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. But Suga isn’t finished yet: “And will you?” Daichi opens his eyes to find Suga staring, intent.

“Yeah.” He feels like he should be smiling or something, but he can’t focus on anything other than the way Suga is looking at him, hesitant, endearing. “Of course.”

Now it’s Suga’s turn to let out a long breath; Daichi notes it’s just as shaky as his own. It hadn’t occurred to him that Suga might be as anxious as he is, that he might have also been anticipating this conversation with a similar (confusing) mixture of emotions.

They sit there looking at their hands for a moment, both too shy to look at each other, until Daichi forces down the catch in his throat. “I’ll be better this time,” he says when he finds words again, “I swear—”

“Don’t swear.” A hint of a smile pulls at the corner of Suga’s mouth. “You don’t need to, as long as you do it.”

“Okay.”

“Well, don’t argue too much,” mutters Suga. Daichi freezes for a moment—but then he realizes Suga is teasing him, and it’s so novel and nostalgic simultaneously that he laughs at the sheer joy of it, of being Suga’s _something_ again. Suga follows suit soon after, covering his mouth with one hand to muffle the sound. He’d always said Daichi’s laugh was contagious, though Daichi privately thought it was more the other way around.

“I will, though,” he says when their laughter dies down. “I’ll be a good friend.”

 _No_ —he regrets his words before he’s even finished saying them, a self-defensive reflex he apparently hasn’t shaken yet. It’s too late to take them back, and now he’ll spend an indefinite time agonizing over it; he’s run himself back into the same rut as before. Just friends, nothing more, nothing less. He looks away, coughs to keep any more words from tumbling out unwanted.

“What’s wrong?” He should’ve guessed that Suga would pick up on his sudden change in demeanor; he was always observant like that.

“Nothing,” says Daichi, too quickly. Suga searches his face, and Daichi schools his expression into something he hopes is neutral enough to fool him, but there’s really no hope.

“There’s something you’re not saying,” Suga realizes. Distantly, Daichi wonders how it’s possible to feel like you’re burning and jumping into ice water simultaneously.

“No.” He shakes his head, still scrambling for casual. “No, that’s all.”

“I _know_ you, Daichi.” Suga doesn’t need to raise his voice; his tone does everything volume can’t. It makes Daichi’s chest ache. “I can tell when you’re lying, so just, _stop_.”

His heart hammers, his soul shrinks away, he wishes the earth would open up and swallow him so he never has to face Suga again; an eternity in the ground would be preferable to this, sitting on the couch with his hands shaking and Suga looking at him like maybe he’s made a mistake trusting Daichi again. He can practically see Suga’s walls going back up. Panic grips him: he has to wipe that look off Suga’s face. His worry is unfounded; trusting Daichi is not a mistake, but Suga doesn’t know this anymore, and he _must_ know. But the only way for him to find out is for Daichi to say the words on the tip of his tongue.

So he gives up, gives in to the falling sensation of surrender: “I think I’m in love with you.” Suga’s mouth falls open. Daichi had been looking at it in lieu of eye contact, but now the motion drives his gaze farther downward to the lines of Suga’s neck. “No—that’s wrong, I _am_ , I have been. I don’t know how long, but I finally figured it out. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I’m here.”

He closes his eyes after the words leave his lips; this is the bravest thing he’s ever done but he’s still too much a coward to keep his eyes open for Suga’s reaction. This is it: either his first hello or his last goodbye. There is no turning back now, and as the seconds tick by and Suga says nothing, dread curdles in his stomach. He wants to scream, or run away, or possibly shrivel up and disappear.

Then the couch cushions shift: Suga moving his weight. “Daichi. Look at me.”

He opens his eyes to find Suga’s unfolded his legs, leaning forward into the space stretched between them. The look on his face is so intense, but it’s not like his anger before—there’s something vulnerable, hopeful, frightening.

“Are you serious?” he asks, his voice low.

“I…” Suga isn’t touching him—he feels the inches between them acutely—but he’s pinned in place, unable to move or speak or blink.

“ _Daichi_.”

Every atom in Daichi’s body screams terror, but there is no confusion now: of this, he is sure. He knows he loves Suga, knows this fact possibly better than his own self. When he speaks it is a release. “Yes.”

“You idiot,” sighs Suga, and leans forward and kisses him.

Temporarily Daichi is so overwhelmed that he actually stops breathing for several seconds while Suga just sort of presses his lips to Daichi’s, until his brain reboots and he realizes that this is _actually happening._ He exhales against Suga’s mouth, shaky, and Suga takes this as encouragement, pressing Daichi back against the couch cushions. He reaches up to grab a fistful of Suga’s shirt and pull him closer. The shirt, a pink plaid that Daichi’s always (privately, embarrassingly) thought of as his personal favorite, is soft from years of washes—though it’s nothing compared to the softness of Suga’s lips, moving against his own.

He worries, momentarily, that his own lips are chapped from the cold earlier, but the thought flies straight out of his head in the next second when Suga sucks his lower lip into his mouth and _bites_. Daichi groans, involuntary; he’d be mortified if he wasn’t consumed by the need to get as close to Suga as he possibly can. He pulls forward, Suga presses back, and the combination manages (with some readjustments) to get them so they’re horizontal on the couch, pillows shoved to the floor.

Kissing Suga is nothing short of incredible: his warm weight pinning Daichi to the couch, his hair pinfeather-soft as Daichi runs his fingers through it, his tongue swiping along the roof of Daichi’s mouth before he pulls back, their lips separating with a pop, to press kisses under the line of his jaw. Every sense is overloaded, every nerve ending alive and humming. It’s not like Daichi hasn’t kissed other people before, he knows what to _do_ , but right now he can’t manage to do much more than gasp, hands scrambling for purchase along Suga’s sides, at the small of his back.

One of Suga’s kisses dips lower, to his collarbone. There’s the barest sting of teeth as he nips at the skin there, and Daichi lets out a truly embarrassing noise, twisting his fingers tighter where they’re tangled in Suga’s hair. This is apparently a good thing to do—Suga groans against his skin, a shudder running hard through his entire body, and Daichi tugs him up to kiss him again.

They go on like that for a while, hands everywhere, occasional little gasps as they learn each other in this way. Oddly enough it’s not too different from learning each other as friends. Suga will roll his eyes every time Daichi mentions the shrimp shirt; Suga will make an immensely satisfying noise if Daichi tugs his hair to tilt his head back, exposing his neck to press open-mouthed kisses against. But some time later—Daichi has no idea how long it’s been, it could be one hour, or two, or possibly several days—the late hour catches up with them, and they find themselves listening to each other breathe, Suga’s forehead tilted down to rest against Daichi’s.

“‘M tired,” murmurs Suga, his lips brushing Daichi’s, not quite a kiss.

“Then sleep.”

“Okay.” He slumps, letting his body go limp, and Daichi _oofs_ at the sudden weight.

“Not _here_ ,” he wheezes, though it loses some of its effect through his laugh. Suga mumbles something incoherent, and Daichi pushes at his shoulder. “Move. You have a bed, you know.”

Suga sighs. “Guess you’re right.” He slides off the couch and to his feet, swaying a little. Daichi laughs at him until he attempts to stand himself and nearly topples over.

“Oh,” he says as Suga snickers.

“Come on.” His fingers circle Daichi’s wrist, eliciting a shiver as he brushes over the pulse point. “Sleep with me.” Normally those words would give Daichi pause, but Suga’s meaning is clear as he shuffles to the bedroom, tugging Daichi along.

Daichi is sure he hasn’t misinterpreted when he takes a step into Suga’s room and a sleep shirt hits him in the face. He splutters, nearly tripping over Suga’s bag in the doorway, and Suga laughs at him again.

“Come on,” he repeats some time later, as Daichi stands in the middle of the room, suddenly hesitant. Suga reaches out a hand, already burrowed deep into a pile of blankets (he always did run cold). There’s some crucial rearranging when Daichi climbs in, his shoulders too broad to let them lay shoulder-to-shoulder, and they end up with Suga’s head nestled in the crook of Daichi’s neck, an arm flung over his torso.

Daichi turns his head to rest his cheek against Suga’s hair, reveling at the feeling. “Koushi…”

“Hmm?”

Oh, he’d said that out loud. He blushes, thankful for the darkness (though Suga might be able to feel how warm he suddenly is, pressed so close). “Good night,” he whispers. Suga mumbles a reply against his skin.

Daichi’s sure he won’t be able to fall asleep—he’s too thrilled to have Suga all around him, in this bed that smells like him—but exhaustion overtakes him, and he drifts into unconsciousness quickly.

***

Daichi wakes up sweating.

How many blankets does Suga even have on his bed? There must be at least five. It probably works well when Suga sleeps alone, but when he’s got Daichi as a personal heater it’s altogether too much for Daichi (who tends to run a bit warm at all times) to handle. He extricates himself from Suga—who stirs but doesn’t wake, murmuring something incoherent—and pads out the door in bare feet.

The place isn’t very big, so he finds the bathroom easily. He also finds that he and Suga are no longer alone.

Daichi and Oikawa blink at each other in surprise for a moment, Oikawa with a cosmetics bag in hand, Daichi with his hand still outstretched for the bathroom doorknob. It’s only a moment before Oikawa’s surprise is replaced by a smirk as he slips past Daichi into the hall.

“Good morning, Dai-chan,” he says. Daichi feels a twitch start up in his eye. “Sleep well?”

“Ah…” He’s never heard someone pack so much suggestiveness into two words. It would be impressive, if it wasn’t so embarrassing. “I, yeah. And—and you?”

“Very well, thanks.” Oikawa’s smirk only grows as he glances over Daichi, taking in his boxers and rumpled t-shirt a size too small. It’s too early for this. “You know, I thought I’d have seen you here before now. Took you long enough, didn’t it?”

“It’s only eight-thirty.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Daichi can feel his face burning as Oikawa disappears into his own room, calling out, “There’s an extra towel on the shelf, if you want it.”

“Thanks,” he mutters, and ducks inside the bathroom.

A quick shower clears the remaining haze of sleep from his mind. When he returns to Suga’s room a few minutes later, he finds Suga sitting up in bed, his eyes scrunched shut, his hair sticking out in a dozen directions. Daichi is not a sappy person (at least, he likes to think he’s not), but as he watches Suga rub the sleep from his eyes it occurs to him that although this is the first morning he gets to wake up to Suga like this, it is far from the last—and he crosses the room to kiss Suga awake fully, tilting his face up with a finger under his chin.

“Morning,” says Suga, voice scratchy with sleep. “Why’re you already up?”

“I wanted to shower.”

“Not what I meant.” Suga squints at him groggily. “It’s too early to be awake.”

“But the sun’s already risen.”

“Gross.”

“You know what’s grosser? Morning breath.”

Suga grabs a pillow to whack him upside the head.

After minimal struggling on Suga’s part, they make it into the kitchen, where Suga perches at the kitchen table, stifling yawns as he directs Daichi to mugs and tea.

“So glad you’re a morning person,” he says, wrapping both hands around the mug Daichi hands him.

“Well, one of us has to be.”

They lapse into contented silence, sipping at their tea (Daichi’s made it a little bitter by mistake, he’s not used to this brand). The refrigerator thrums, a breeze filters in through the open window.

“How long can you stay?” asks Suga later, words muffled by Daichi’s shoulder. They’re back in bed, tangled up on top of the blankets, kissing lazily until Daichi comes up for air.

“My train leaves this afternoon.” Suga hums, disappointed, as a blush creeps up Daichi’s neck with realization. “All my stuff is still at the hostel. I should… probably get that, at some point,” he says reluctantly.

“You could ask someone else to pack for you.”

“Suga…” He’s cut off as Suga kisses him again with intent, sliding his tongue along Daichi’s lower lip. “Mm—Suga, no, I have to go.”

Suga pulls back to frown at him, and Daichi is caught off guard by the way the midmorning light throws him into soft relief. “Fine,” says Suga, “you can go, as long as you tell me when you’re coming back again.”

“Isn’t it your turn to visit me, now?”

“Hm, you’re right.”

Daichi laughs. “Don’t sound so disappointed. You’ll like Tokyo.”

“Why, because it has you in it?”

“Gross,” he mimics at the same time Suga makes an _ughhh_ noise, scrunching his nose at himself.

“We _are_ gross. Who let us be this way?” He rolls off of Daichi and to his feet in one fluid motion. After they’re both dressed and at least semi-presentable again, he continues, “Actually, I don’t know if I can come for a while. I have tests almost every week.” Daichi’s heart pangs a little at the disappointment evident on Suga’s face.

“We’ll figure it out. We have time.”

It’s not even eleven o’clock, the whole day stretches ahead of them. And as Daichi shrugs on his coat, standing in the doorway of Suga’s apartment, the coming months open up before him in his mind’s eye; he sees the promise of quiet train rides and long evenings in, sunlit days and firefly nights. The calm settling in his chest is a grace, now that he’s accepted the one great truth of his life: how he is in love, and is loved in return. This must be how the earth feels in the spring, he thinks—warm and hopeful and new—and with the memory of Suga smiling into their goodbye kiss fading on his lips, he tilts his face up to the sun, breathes in, and steps out the door.

**Author's Note:**

> my daisuga manifesto is complete. thanks for reading!!


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